4 Answers
4

I found a good reference to what the BLASTER environment variable is looking for at this link. To determine these parameters you're going to have to check the set up of your card ... this was always the hardest part of getting these games to run correctly.

While you could probably solve this particular problem and get a little bit closer to running Quake, you're likely to run into further problems later on down the road. It's a lot of work that can be easily avoided!

I'm going to suggest trying one of the many Quake clients that have been updated since the open source release of the Quake engine years ago.

There's probably at least one that keeps the same graphic quality as the original Quake, although if you don't mind it being a bit fancier, that's certainly possible as well. They all should support the levels/enemies/etc of the original Quake, and you'll need the PAK files that came with your original release in order to play them.

DOSBox is probably a good secondary app to look into, if you're a bit more interested in playing the game in all its former DOS glory.

I would suggest downloading WinQuake from id Software's ftp site instead.

WinQuake (WQ) is a native Win32 version of Quake, and will run on
either Win95 or Windows NT 4.0 or later. It is designed to take
advantage of whatever enhanced video, sound, and input capabilities
(such as DirectX or VESA VBE video modes) are present, but has
fallback functionality so it can run on any Win95 or NT 4.0 or later
system, even if neither DirectX nor VESA VBE is available. You may
experience problems running WQ on some systems, because driver and
operating-system support for game functionality are not yet mature
under Win32, and many bugs and incompatibilities remain in those
components. If you encounter what seems to be a bug, first please
check through the list of known problems, below. If your problem
doesn't appear on the list, please fill out and submit the WQ bug
report at http://www.idsoftware.com/contact/.

Granted, WinQuake was released in 1997, so no guarantees that it will still run.

WinQuake requires that you already have Quake installed to run (just like QuakeWorld or GLQuake).

best bet is to buy a soundblaster 16 card. can find em for like 5 bucks, most of the ones left on ebay are actually only emulations of opl3. if you own a laptop though you're basically screwed. wavetable synthesis ruined video game music and put the tracking community back a decade.